Uncommon Wisdom:

October, 2007

CableLabs is releasing a new version of the PacketCable specification used for voice services over cable. The 2.0 release will include support for business features and also support for IMS-based FMC, presumably to support either a cable company push into wireless or an MVNO relationship with a...

Business Week and S&P are now publishing reasonable analysis of the cable/telco competition. The recent work concedes that cable will likely take some market share from the telcos in voice services, but that telcos will take share in both data and video services. As we've said many...

Research is casting doubt on the notion that consumer demand will explode bandwidth needs, a story promulgated by Cisco and others. Skeptics note that in mature markets where high speed is available, traffic grows at about 18% per year. We agree with the notion that traffic explosions are highly...

Google continues to drive speculation that it will launch a mobile device, less likely to be a handset than to be something more content-friendly and thus more a portable unit. The speculation we've heard most recently is that the platform will be larger than an iPhone and will work both with WiFi...

AT&T has reportedly announced that it will be substituting VoIP for circuit-switched voice in its U-verse service offering. The move is not yet posted as a press release on the AT&T site, but if true, it raises some interesting issues. The company does not propose to lower the price, and it...

Pyramid Research has released a report that indicates that cable companies enjoy more synergy in triple- and quad-play services and as a result, telcos are losing margin in their multi-tiered services. While we agree with some of this, we think it misses some key points. First, the best competitive...

More angst about the state of the Internet is reported in the WSJ as key players in the development of the Net step up and talk about the directions things are taking, including the "parallel universe" approach that we have advocated since the middle 1990s. The notion is that commercial pressure...

Bain, a private equity firm, and Huawei will combine to purchase 3Com in a move that seems to have outlasted many of the analysts who covered the firms. Huawei and 3Com had long been in a partnership that the former hoped would give it an entre into the high-end US network equipment market, but...

In a rare show of joint Internet discontent, a group of tech pioneers that included Bob Metcalfe, Don Proctor of Cisco, Jim Bidzos of Verisign, and John Cioffi of Stanford commented that the Internet was "sufficient" which was hardly a ringing endorsement, and noted that difficulties with attitudes...

Nokia is in discussions to purchase Navteq, a leading company in GPS and mapping software for navigation. The move is certainly linked to the increased interest in building GPS navigation capabilities into high-end phones, and this is we think an important indicator that the mobile operators and...